Every Magic Mouse Gesture on Mac (Full Guide)

The entire top shell of a Magic Mouse is a touch surface — the same idea as a trackpad, laid over a mouse. Most owners scroll with it and never learn the rest: smart zoom, page swipes, hopping between full-screen apps, and opening Mission Control, all without moving your hand to the keyboard. Here's the complete list and where each switch lives.

Where the settings live

Open System Settings → Mouse with the Magic Mouse connected (the pane only appears when a mouse is present). Gestures split across two tabs — Point & Click and More Gestures — on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia alike. Every gesture below is a toggle or dropdown there, so anything you change is reversible on the spot, and hovering a control plays a short demo video of the gesture.

Point & Click gestures

• Scroll — one finger, any direction. Glide a fingertip on the shell to scroll vertically, horizontally, or diagonally; the surface tracks free-angle movement, not just up/down. Controlled by the Natural scrolling toggle (flip it if content moves the "wrong" way — note it also flips the trackpad).
• Secondary click — click the right side. The shell is one physical button, so right-click is a setting: enable Secondary click and choose right or left side. Lift your index finger when you right-click; a finger resting on the left can make the click register as primary.
• Smart zoom — double-tap with one finger. Two light taps (no click) zooms Safari, Preview, Maps, and PDFs in on the paragraph or column under the pointer; double-tap again to zoom back out. If a website's text is squint-sized, this is the fastest fix macOS has.

More Gestures

• Swipe between pages — scroll left or right with one finger. A sideways one-finger swipe goes back or forward in Safari, Finder, and most browsers. It's also the gesture people trigger by accident when scrolling drifts sideways — the dropdown offers Swipe with Two Fingers or Off if that's you.
• Swipe between full-screen applications — two fingers left or right. Slides you across Spaces and full-screen apps, the Magic Mouse equivalent of the trackpad's three-finger sideways swipe. Two-finger gestures work best with the mouse held loosely — thumb and ring finger gripping the sides, index and middle fingers swiping the top.
• Mission Control — double-tap with two fingers. Two taps with two fingers opens the every-window overview; repeat to close it. Distinct from smart zoom by finger count: one finger zooms, two fingers open Mission Control. It ships enabled, so if you've ever had windows unexpectedly fan out, this was why.

Making them stick

Two-finger gestures on a mouse-sized surface take a week of muscle memory — commit to the loose grip and they become automatic. Start with just two: smart zoom (you'll use it daily) and the two-finger Spaces swipe. If a gesture stops working, check the basics in order: the toggle is on, the mouse's Bluetooth connection is healthy, and no utility like a mouse-driver app is intercepting touches. And if a gesture you never use keeps firing accidentally (page swipes are the usual offender), turning it off costs nothing — every dropdown here includes Off, and the default is one click away.

Know the surface's limits, too: unlike a trackpad, the Magic Mouse has no pinch-to-zoom, no Launchpad pinch, and no three-finger anything — two fingers is its maximum. For zooming beyond smart zoom's fixed jump, enable scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom under System Settings → Accessibility → Zoom: hold the modifier and scroll on the mouse to magnify the whole screen smoothly.